The Top 15 Sites for Copyright and Royalty-Free Images

Maybe you’re an aspiring photographer looking for inspiration. Or an up-and-coming entrepreneur trying to find stock photography to add to your website.

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Whatever your profession, this list of the best stock photography websites will ensure that you’ll always have access to copyright and royalty-free images.

How Do Copyright Free Images Work?

Some websites allow you to download pictures for private use (e.g. background wallpapers) yet disallow images to be used commercially. This includes instances such as business cards, websites, or posters. The images on the following websites have protection under Creative Commons CC0:

“The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.”—CreativeCommons.org

The following websites either support or are fully composed of CC0 images available in the public domain. The owners of these images have allowed users to modify, edit, and use their images without copyright backlash.

Before delving into the free stock image sites, there are two common courtesies to consider when using CC0 images.

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Although you do not have to give credit to the creator, we recommend that you do to publicize the artists’ efforts.

These websites often have a Donate page or splash screen. If you use free image hosting sites often, consider donating to their cause. If everyone using a copyright-free image site threw in the price of a coffee, it would greatly benefit the photographers and artists offering their wares for free.

Now that that’s cleared up, here are the websites you need to bookmark for quality, copyright-free images.

Once you register for a free membership at Freerange, thousands of high-resolution stock photos will be at your fingertips at no cost. All of the website’s images can be used for personal or commercial projects. For photographers, Freerange also offers Google AdSense revenue sharing when you contribute.

In addition to thousands of unique images, the site also has about 20,000 CC0 photos, most of which have accurate keywords and descriptions.

Pexels is a website that wants to help. Started in 2015, it has grown to be a reputable stock photo library. Its mission statement phrases their aim best:

We help millions of designers, writers, artists, programmers and other creators to get access to beautiful photos that they can use freely which empowers them to create amazing products, designs, stories, websites, apps, art and other work. We call it: “Empowering Creators”—Pexels.com

Pexels is also unique in that it doesn’t only display images located on the Pexels website. It also outsources images from other high-quality websites such as Little Visuals.

Although Flickr is not dedicated to public domain images, it boasts an extensive library of high-quality public domain images.

Flickr is, and has been for a long time, one of the greatest image libraries on the internet. With millions of high-quality public domain images, you’re unlikely to run out of stock photography anytime soon.

You can easily lose yourself for hours scouring through the beautiful copyright-free pictures available on Life of Pix.

Created by the LEEROY advertising agency in Montreal, Life of Pix is a haven for free, public domain photography. Better yet, its Life of Vids website contains even more impressive stock video footage, alla available for free.

Pixabay is another image repository that integrates images from other image hosting sites. It attempts to gather the very best of free stock images for your own personal or commercial use.

Pixabay also allows easy access to “camera search,” which allows users to explore images based on the camera used to take them. This is a great resource for both beginners and professional photographers alike.

Touting over 34 million freely usable pieces of media, including videos and sounds, Wikimedia is a necessity for graphic designers, photographers, and artists looking for free, high-quality images. Wikimedia is also part of a much larger organization dedicated to free images, education, and information.

They say something works well when you hardly notice it at all, and that’s exactly what Burst provides. In the same vein as Unsplash, Burst not only provides a sleek interface to explore but a very wide selection of images and categories to choose from as well.

Better yet, it provides both low- and high-quality images without copyright, depending on whether you’re adding images to a website or using images for graphic design.

The team behind Freerange also operates another free site specializing in vintage images, called Vintage Stock Photos. The content previously required payment, but now you can find thousands of dollars’ worth of quality vintage photos available at no extra charge.

Vintage Stock Photos is another site where you can lose serious time browsing through the catalog. The range of copyright-free images spans multiple decades and provides a fantastic snapshot of life through the ages.

Negative Space offers up thousands of beautiful royalty-free images for you, covering a comprehensive range of categories. Like some of the other top copyright-free image sites, you can search Negative Space using the color of the image you want, rather than a specific search term or category.

New free images are added all the time, so make sure to bookmark Negative Space for your next project.

Your final option for royalty-free stock images is the excellent Reshot. If you want truly unique stock images, Reshot is one of your best options.

The development and creative team vet each copyright-free shot uploaded to the site, ensuring only the best of the best are available to you. That means the standard of photography on show at Reshot is very high—and that will be reflected in your work, too.

Look at the quality on offer in my casual search term, “eggs,” pictured above. There are some brilliant high-resolution shots there.

More Copyright-Free Media for You to Use

With so many sites dedicated to bringing you high-quality stock images for free, you may feel overwhelmed with choice.

However, we recommend focusing on the one site that most appeals, and browsing the range of copyright-free images available until you find something that appeals.

Free photostocks – it’s good. But they definitely lose paid. Shutterstock istokphoto and – apart from the competition. However, all this is expensive. But there is one site that helps all who wish to download at a substantial discount from pay photostocks. This site is called shopdiz.biz. Several times used the services of the site – everything honestly.However, registration on this site – only for an invite. Here are three free invitation:

Our site, allourstock.com is not spammy, itâ€™s built around a nice, easy-to-use functional layout with easy drag-and-drop interface, and has a lot more planned for the future. Currently we have about 500 images but we have a database of over 7000 yet to be added and growing everyday. I personally shoot photos myself and create custom designs as well. All are available for person OR commercial use, most of which do not require attribution.

(BTW the above and below comments are just about reuse permission, I haven't yet had time to check the quality and variety of the photos themselves)

Some of the sites mentioned in the comments:

Morguefile - NOT copyright-free actually, but a very permissive license, so I'm pretty sure I can use their stock. Allows commercial use, no crediting required. Looks like I might be using Freerange and Morguefile.

Photovaco - minimal info on their site, basically just this from their front page:

We provide free stock photos with high resolution for both personal and commercial projects. You can use our free photos in websites, video, TV production, forum, blogs, school projects and print medias including newspapers, magazine, books, CD covers. OK, let's say, you can download, edit and use all photos anywhere and anyhow you like except for abuse.

Fotolia - as original poster said, you have to pay. Yes, the prices are probably reasonable for many people, but I would have to pay out of my own pocket, which rules it out for me.

I create online exercises for use through an LMS, for a private university that charges tuition. So I appreciate sites with photos that allow commercial use, and thanks for these links.

Some comments upon further investigation of these sites.

Freerange - NOT copyright-free actually, but a very permissive license, so I'm pretty sure I can use their stock. From their license page:

License Summary: You can do nearly anything with the images, commercial or not. Just don't redistribute them - this means don't host the images or repackage them, just post a link and let others download them, just as you did.

Freedigitalphotos - NOT copyright-free actually, but a fairly permissive license, so I can use their stock if I provide a credit and hyperlink to their website.

Stock.xchng - NOT copyright-free actually, but with somewhat permissive licenses. I've used their stuff before, thinking all I had to do was credit Stock.xchng. But upon further research it seems a little more complicated than that. First, photos are covered by a variety of restrictions; most of them are "Standard restrictions", which are the ones I used. But some have more restrictions: be careful.
Secondly, the usage summary seems to indicate I have to credit each individual artist (not the site) AND notify them too. That would a *real* pain for me.

Flickr CC content - NOT copyright-free actually, but with a variety of Creative Commons licenses. Of the 5 licenses there, the ony one I'm sure I can use is the CC Attribution License (BY). And that requires me to credit each individual artist per their requirements. A pain.

In short, none of these sites are offering truly copyright-free photos (i.e. public domain). But they all offer copyrighted photos with a license allowing some re-use if you comply with certain conditions.
For me, the "free-est" is Freerange (commercial use, no crediting required) and I think I'll be using it in future.
Next comes Freedigitalphoto, which requires a credit & link just to the site.
Flickr & stock.xchng offer some possibilities but frankly the requirement to credit each individual artist (or even notify them!) means I won't bother.
And Stockvault is out of the question for me: not only no commerical use, but also the viral "Share Alike" factor that means the exercises I make that include such a photo also become CC BY-NC-SA. My employers would not be happy with that!

Please note I'm not an expert, so my understanding may be wrong. And please note that I have specific needs; yours may differ, so a license that's bad for me might be good for you.

Gavin is a Senior Writer for MUO. He is also the Editor and SEO Manager for MakeUseOf's crypto-focused sister site, Blocks Decoded. He has a BA (Hons) Contemporary Writing with Digital Art Practices pillaged from the hills of Devon, as well as over a decade of professional writing experience. He enjoys copious amounts of tea.